Guy Ritchie: ‘I’d Pay to Play Director’

Madonna’s ex Guy Ritchie would secretly pay to direct movies if he had to, because he loves the process so much.

The Brit, who made his mark with the films Snatch and Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels in the late 1990s, has moved on to blockbusters with movies like Sherlock Holmes, The Man From U.N.C.L.E., and the upcoming King Arthur: Legend of the Sword, and he admits he still loves what he does for a living.

“Being a film director, I couldn’t think of a more pleasurable job,” he tells WENN. “I don’t like to say this in public but I’d do it for free. More than that I would pay to do it! You’re still living out a childhood fantasy by playing the film director as a role and that’s a fantasy.”

Guy even enjoys tackling the fear that almost drowns him before each new project: “Usually there’s an overriding sense of fear before I make a film that it’s not gonna happen,” he explains. “You get invested in these things emotionally until it gets greenlit and you get distracted by that.

“I’ve never really not been distracted by that because in the back of your mind there are components that could fall by the wayside. If that happens the whole thing implodes, so the overriding fear is collapse. There’s positive fear and there’s negative fear. The type of fear that galvanises activity is the kind of fear I can live with.”

And he even enjoys the countless hours in the editing room as he attempts to cut an epic down to a two-hour movie.

His new King Arthur film came in at three-and-a-half hours before he started making edits.
“My first cut was three-and-a-half hours long and I’m quite prodigal with my film, so I don’t mind chucking stuff out,” he adds. “By the time I finished it, I got it just under two hours and that was hard work and time-consuming.”

But his leading man, Charlie Hunnam, thinks Ritchie has done a tremendous job: “I don’t think I’ve ever had an experience where the final result was quite different than what I had anticipated. It was anybody’s guess what would end up on screen and how it would end up on screen.

“I came out very excited about the film and both Guy and his editor did a pretty sensational job of keeping as much as they could.”